Can Wildcat do Flannery O’Connor justice?
Jessica Hooten Wilson
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On March 1, 1957, CBS televised Flannery O’Connor’s short story The Life You Save May Be Your Own, starring Gene Kelly and Agnes Moorehead. In the original story, a one-armed handyman named Mr. Shiftlet agrees to marry a woman’s handicapped daughter if he can keep her rundown car. Not caring much for the civil union, he abandons the girl in a bar and drives away to face the fury of God, symbolically spinning toward him in a tornado.
O’Connor’s stories are like that — strange depictions of human sin that reveal to us how imperfect and susceptible to evil that we truly are. For this reason, her stories did not make for lighthearted television. The producers altered the story into a comedy where Mr. Shiftlet stays contentedly married at the end.
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O’Connor knew it was coming. The year prior, when she sold the television rights, O’Connor confided in a friend, “Mr. Shiftlet and the idiot daughter will no doubt go off in a Chrysler and live happily ever after.” She wasn’t worried about the adaptations to her work because the money financed a new fridge for her and her mother: “While they make hash out of my story, she and me will make ice in the new refrigerator.”
Many people did not find the alterations problematic but told Flannery that the televised version was a vast improvement to the original. No one wanted the uncomfortable story. No one wants to see the truth about themselves.
In the upcoming feature film Wildcat, writer and director Ethan Hawke and his daughter Maya attempt to show viewers the truth about Flannery O’Connor, pointing the camera not only at her work but also at her life. Hawke said he wanted to “make a movie that Flannery would be proud of.” He was likely thinking of the 1950s versions that were so unfaithful to her art. Wildcat will be the first biopic of O’Connor, and it integrates her stories into the depiction of her life.
Fans of O’Connor are concerned about the film prior to seeing it because readers are always apprehensive with interpretations of “their” O’Connor. But devotees have to let O’Connor go! One of the reasons that O’Connor’s work speaks to readers from around the world and across time is because of the various interpretations that are possible. She cannot be co-opted by one tribe or read only one way. As Hawke has said about his and Maya’s film, it is one version of her story.
There is not merely one story to tell about Flannery O’Connor.
In their first public dialogue about Wildcat, Ethan and Maya Hawke explained to Bishop Robert Barron how they came to know O’Connor and wanted to make a feature film of her life. Maya noted that her initial encounter with O’Connor’s short stories was in the high school classroom, and the students seemed to light up: “Some people hated them; some people thought they were brilliant … I got excited.”
It was the stories that charged up her fellow students. Whereas O’Connor’s life was rather simple, as O’Connor herself admitted. She thought there would be no biographies of her because “lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”
When Maya desired to make a film about O’Connor’s life, she brought the project to her father and hoped that O’Connor was wrong — that there was “exciting copy” lying hidden somewhere. The key was integrating the art with the life. Ethan himself grew up familiar with Flannery O’Connor and her Catholic contemporaries, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy. He presented the idea to Maya that they could show how Flannery’s faith and imagination intersect “by interweaving the stories and the life and show how within all of us we are a kaleidoscope … of different characters.” Maya and Laura Linney, who plays Flannery’s mother, Regina, act out the stories in addition to portraying the biographical figures.
When O’Connor died in 1964, she was an unfinished person — as are we all. She saw human beings as “goods under construction.” Those who approach her life and try to retell it will only see in part; no one can see O’Connor from her interior to her exterior life. The very approach should be, in another biographer Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s words, “presumptuous.”
In January, I will be as presumptuous as the Hawkes by publishing her incomplete manuscript pages from her unfinished third novel, Why do the Heathen Rage? How I desired to depict the woman herself as the writer, as well as the story she was telling. The artist Steve Prince tries to make these scenes come to life through his illustrations. O’Connor’s fiction, essays, and biography show us an endlessly fascinating genius that cannot be labeled, reduced, or forgotten.
The title of the film, Wildcat, hints at the complicated nature of Flannery and her art. Borrowed from Flannery’s 1947 MFA thesis but published posthumously, her story “Wildcat” follows a blind man who is staring down death. Ethan said he chose the title because there is a “wildcat inside this demure, small, polite young woman, and it was one of her first stories.”
In the story, the main character observes about wildcats: “They like to look at things. So there’s this conflict in every cat, this desire to see things, look at them, and that rubs against their desire for privacy, to stay hidden.”
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The old man is speaking literally about a wildcat in the woods, but he could as well be revealing much about O’Connor the author. For O’Connor, too, liked to look at things, observing all around her while not wanting to be exposed herself. When Wildcat is available to viewers outside of the small festival crowd, her art and life and this version of it may once again show us how to see the hidden things.
Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones chair of great books at Pepperdine University and author of several books, including the upcoming Flannery O’Connor’s Why do the Heathen Rage?